Google’s Picasa Ported to Linux Using Wine

Google Labs has released Picasa for Linux, ported using Wine by CodeWeavers. The free Picasa download is available now. My Take: The software requirements are fairly hefty in that some features require cutting edge programs like HAL and a 2.6+ kernel, but this is fantastic news for Linux users. Picasa is an excellent program that rivals iPhoto. Update by AS : Google ported Picasa using Wine, but it was still a LOT of work and the result was completely effective. Please read more on the WineHQ mailing list. Update 2: You do not need Wine installed to run this – it’s a self-contained Wine lib. Also, the Picasa download apparently doesn’t work from all countries. Update by TH: Here’s a review.

Calling it cutting edge in general is misleading. It’s no more cutting edge than SP4 for Win2K.

Come on, that’s insane. SP4 is *old*, straight up. HAL is relatively new. Here’s the thing – people not running HAL and not running 2.6 kernels are not necessarily running old systems. I have several Linux machines here on kernel 2.4. They run perfectly fine without any problems and are still entirely productive.

Either way, you’re arguing over semantics. If you don’t like the term “cutting edge,” please just sub in your own term.

I agree that Picasa is better than iPhoto by itself. But the beauty of iPhoto is it’s integration into other programs. The way I can just choose any song from my iTunes library for use in a slideshow, the way iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand, iWeb, Keynote and Pages all can access my photo library without ever having to open iPhoto is great. Also, if you don’t like the editing in iPhoto you can always change which program edits your photos from within iPhoto.

Picasa is a great product, however there are already alternatives (I’m not saying if they’re worse/better) for the linux desktop. Both Gnome and KDE have suitable applications that integrate with their parent environments.

Picasa is a great product, however there are already alternatives (I’m not saying if they’re worse/better) for the linux desktop. Both Gnome and KDE have suitable applications that integrate with their parent environments.

nothing offered by either gnome or KDE up til now even comes close to rivaling Picasa. This a great day.

Whether you guys agree if it’s truelly ported or not, it runs as fast in my FC5 virtual machine on VMWare as it does natively on WinXP. That’s good enough for me.

Well i don’t want to go to the which one is better, simply to say that Iphoto seems more feature rich than Picassa. I meam the integration with all the iLife apps, the full screen editing tool, the photocasting, the tools to create calendars, photo books, and greeting cards are really killer features that make Iphoto more atractive than Picassa.

Also i feel that the interface of Picassa is rather confusing compared to Iphoto which is easier to use and understand.

Bull, whatever or not you can run it has nothing to do with the quality of the program.

I think the conclusion you should have made would be one of the following:

1) I think Picassa is a better program than iPhoto

This would assume that you actually tried out both programs in order to make a judgement, of course if you haven’t your oppinion on the matter isn’t terribly useful in the first place.

2) I think iPhoto is a better program than Picassa, BUT not so much that i want to buy a new computer to run it.

See that would be perfectly ok, i know that I certainly wouldn’t buy a new computer just to run iPhoto. If you are happy with what you have, don’t have the money, or are just too cheap to buy something new, then thats all fine and dandy, but using that as an argument as to why the alternative is not better just makes you look silly.

Would you be consistent and say that your old CPU is better than whatever new super CPU is released in the future because you would have to buy a new motherboard to use it, and you have serveral perfectly good motherboards already?

What Apple should do is sell iWorks and iLife for other operating systems. Stop trying to make people buy hardware and an OS they evidently do not want, in order to get applications they might want if they could run them.

There is a precedent. Look at Filemaker. Filemaker lived and flourished. Look at Hypercard. It withered on the vine.

Generally speaking there is tension between the OS division, the hardware division, and the application division. The OS division will want to sell as many copies as possible and to hell with hardware restrictions. The applications division will want to sell as many copies as possible and to hell with OS restrictions. The hardware people at Apple say, I want there to be some reason why people have to buy my expensive hardware.

Sadly for Apple, they win every time, and they cripple the OS and the Applications divisions in the process.

Picasa looks just fine to me. Probably not a lot better than the other free Linux apps, but quite nice. We’ll try it out. Right now we use EOG or GTKam, and those work fine too. Export of thumnails to web page could be quite nice. See how we go…

Hardware is Apple’s business. The software divisions only exist to support hardware sales. Whether programmers on the teams want to release their creations into the wild, and whether people who visit OSNews desperately want to play with the OS without buying a Mac, is meaningless. Apple makes its money from hardware.

The fact is, OS X and iLife are good/desirable enough to make people buy a $1000+ computer just to use them. Maybe you’re not convinced, but Apple is already turning a profit without your help. They won’t be offended if all you do is admire from afar.

I think people have trouble with this concept because they liken OS X to Linux and Windows while there’s really no analogy to be made between Microsoft, Apple, and Linus/GNU. Microsoft sells software for systems they don’t manufacture, GNU gives away software for everything with a microprocessor in it, and Apple makes an operating system to be run on the desktop systems they sell. Completely different modes of operation. You could even throw Sun into the mix for a completely different fourth model: sell high-end servers and workstations at a lucrative premium, give away an operating system to a very broad base of users, and sell technical support, training, and automated upgrades.

It’s an accepted concept in environmental science that no two animals can survive in direct competition, so they occupy slightly different niches. OS/2 and BeOS used to occupy Microsoft’s niche. Oops. Apple isn’t looking to do the same.

You know, Google are supposed to be a thorn in Microsoft’s side, and are supposed to have a wealth of knowledge about using open source software and porting to different platforms and yet they design an applications specifically for Windows and have to specify WINE as a pre-requisite. Every single time with Google it’s Windows first, and that must please Microsoft no end.

Would it not have been sensible to have a common, cross-platform codebase through Qt, or something like it, so that porting to different platforms would always be a possibility? You would think Google would have a policy on these things.

Additionally, there are photo management apps already on Linux systems like Lphoto, F-Spot and digiKam. Why use Picassa above these, given that they’ll already be pre-installed? These companies always seem to miss the boat when it comes to desktop Linux.

Google bought Picasa to other company, so your claims have no sense. They had to run whatever code the Picasa guys had written.

Anyway, if Google always chooses Windows is because windows takes, you know, basically all the desktop market except a few single-digit percentage of linux & mac boxes. But you can be pretty sure google doesn’t want to please too much to Microsoft, a company that (ahem) wants to kill them.

Google bought Picasa to other company, so your claims have no sense. They had to run whatever code the Picasa guys had written.

They make perfect sense, and they’re not claims. Regardless of whether they bought it from another company making it cross-platform, or picking something that is, should have been a central part of Google’s thinking. There are plenty of free photo management apps around they could have done something with. Maybe they should have taken something from the Linux world and ported it to Windows? All they’re doing here is taking a Windows executable and running it on a Linux system. They haven’t ported anything.

Whatever, you simply can’t see Picassa getting used by very many people in the Linux world.

Maybe they thought Picasa was the best of the bunch and it made sense that it was already written in Windows, so it would spread the fastest and get the word out? Then worry about the rest later.

Eh? ‘It’s written for Windows so it would get the word out’? That’s pretty daft. It’s only a photo management app we’re talking about here. It would have ran on Windows just as well even if it was made a cross-platform app.

Don’t kid yourself, Google is a business, not the magical open-source hero corporation.

Yer, which is why it would have made more sense, and been cheaper, had they made Picasso or something else cross-platform in the first place. It makes zero sense the way they’ve done it, and Google just haven’t been using their famed thinking caps and thinking ahead.

They use open source software, and in the long run, they need to get their applications and platform off Windows and on to something else as Microsoft looks to angle Windows more towards their own services. That’s not an open source hero thing, that’s just a business fact.

“Yer, which is why it would have made more sense, and been cheaper, had they made Picasso or something else cross-platform in the first place. It makes zero sense the way they’ve done it, and Google just haven’t been using their famed thinking caps and thinking ahead.”

Ehm, iirc they bought picasa, so they had no influence on how it was written in the first place.

Also, I don’t get all these negative comments.

I just gave it a try, it’s dead simple to install, it integrate quite nicely, it even looks quite nicely and from what I can tell it works.

Add to this that a free software project received more than 250 contributions in the process of porting picasa and I don’t really see what’s there to complain.

Ehm, iirc they bought picasa, so they had no influence on how it was written in the first place.

Errr, they bought Picassa which meant that they should have had full knowledge of what it was designed for and where they were going to use it. Don’t make it sound as if they didn’t have control. They obviously had, but they didn’t think about anything else other than running this on Windows. That’s not a positive sign.

Also, I don’t get all these negative comments.

I just gave it a try, it’s dead simple to install, it integrate quite nicely, it even looks quite nicely and from what I can tell it works.

The point is that it is still a Windows application, and Google are taking the jumping through hoops method that companies like IBM have taken to getting applications to work on a Linux platform. There’s consequently a lot of duplication of work between the application and a surrounding desktop environment, and there’s also the problem of CD burning (does that have to be duplicated as well?) and codecs.

I don’t mean to be nasty to companies like Google (a similar thing happened to Nero in the face of applications like K3B), but they’re really going to have to think harder about how they commit to platforms other than Windows in the future. Porting Windows applications as an afterthought, although useful for existing applications that cannot be changed, is just never going to get them the support they need to make Linux’s market share meaningful to them and help Linux along. Consequently, their focus will naturally continue to be on maintaining and creating Windows applications.

Word of mouth my friend. Windows has a large user base, so there are more potential people to try it, and more potential people for those who try it to tell about Picasa.

How would it have been cheaper to write for Linux when the app was already coded for Windows?

Why would they care in the first place to spend that much time writing for Linux? How much do you think they really care about Linux? They use it for their own servers because it gives them the flexibility to do what they want and it’s cheaper. Writing software for Picasa is not “cheaper” than writing for Windows.

Word of mouth my friend. Windows has a large user base, so there are more potential people to try it, and more potential people for those who try it to tell about Picasa.

That’s NOT the point. They could quite easily have had a cross platform app that worked perfectly on Windows, and was also trivial to port to other platforms.

How would it have been cheaper to write for Linux when the app was already coded for Windows?

If what they used was cross-platform from day one they could have had a Linux version, a Mac version and a flagship Windows version from the start. Easy. It need not have been Picassa if they had thought about where the app was going to end up.

“Would it not have been sensible to have a common, cross-platform codebase through Qt, or something like it, so that porting to different platforms would always be a possibility? You would think Google would have a policy on these things. “

They probably do, and no matter how you look at it, QT is not cost effective. For multiple platforms it is $6600 USD per developer for Windows, Linux and Mac versions. Why would you spend all that money to give away toy apps? Lets be realistic in it since the apps they have already exist in another form, and are fairly useless IMO. Google Earth for example…it really does serve no purpose but to give you pretty and outdated pictures of an area. So, why should they spend that kind of money?

They probably do, and no matter how you look at it, QT is not cost effective. For multiple platforms it is $6600 USD per developer for Windows, Linux and Mac versions. Why would you spend all that money to give away toy apps? Lets be realistic in it since the apps they have already exist in another form, and are fairly useless IMO. Google Earth for example…it really does serve no purpose but to give you pretty and outdated pictures of an area. So, why should they spend that kind of money?

Ask them. Google Earth is using Qt, so they seem to disagree with you on Qt not bein costeffective…

“When asked if the additions to WINE would bootstrap Google Earth’s porting progress, DiBona answered in the negative, explaining that Google Earth relied on Qt and GL libraries and code, so additional WINE support would not help. No timeline for that application’s release was revealed at this time.”

Now while I like the effort Google has undertaken to release this for Linux, I’d sill much prefer that all of these “Linux” applications be properly written in the first place to run on any UNIX or *nix clone.

POSIX anyone??

Hell, even Linus tried to make Linux as POSIX compatable as possible – perhaps he was on to something?

According to the user page, that poster is in Bulgaria and has posted a grand total of 29 words to OS News. I’m going to go out on a limb here and point out that (s)he’s probably white and doesn’t know much English. Racist was the wrong word, but you can’t expect everyone on Earth to know what Americans will nitpick or find offensive. It wasn’t appropriate to react that strongly (I’m talking mostly to the people who modded it down.) Even I can’t think of a word that fits Google’s action here except for unfair. Xenophobic and nationalist don’t fit any better, especially since they’re no good at describing specific actions. The Internet is worldwide. To go out of your way just to block users from outside the country is… well, it seems kinda racist.

And don’t bother pointing out that the US is a mixed population. Racism is about perception and knee-jerk reactions, not careful study and even-handed application.

It’s not running “under WINE” but using libwine. If you have the Win32 source code, the libwine library provides a native implementation of that API for Linux/UNIX. Thus, you can compile the code as a native application and do away with the overhead of WINE itself.

While I have not done it myself, I have talked to several people that have ported Win32 apps using libwine, and the general consensus is that it is very straight-forward and pretty quick to do. I suspect, for example, if Intuit wanted to make QuickBooks for Linux they could put 2 guys on it and turn it out in a week or two and maintain a common code base between Windows and Linux. Not that they will. Intuit gets thousands of requests for it and their policy is to explicitly ignore all user requests for porting their applications.

Wine requires quite a bit of tweaking to acceptably run any moderately complex windows app. I guess this and windows source code cleanup to only use mainstream API calls accounts for porting. Besides requirements clearly state that they added some Linux specific bits.

Actually it has because you are not running a windows binary (*.exe) straight in WINE. They have Linux specific Binaries making windows API calls (as they did not want to re-write the whole thing, understandably)

I have to admit that there are many small apps that I envy my Windows friends for and on top of this list you will find Picasa.

Picasa wipes the floor with iPhoto.

Apple’s offering is in my mind worthless for any catalogging anybody taking more than 50 pictures a month will want to do:

– They don’t allow for picture referencing. Everything has to fit in a iPhoto’s library structure. it Sucks

– Tagging pictures is not very intuitive (adding keywords) and very extensive. Keywords show up in a side bar witch can only hold so many keywords. No alphabetical sorting of the keywords either. No Boolean searches. Sucks harder.

On Mac if you want something decent you have to go Pro and fork out $200 for iView Media Pro, which in itself is pretty functional but definitely not worth 1/3 of Photoshop’s price.

Aperture sucks too because of the file structure and mostly because I need a $2000 machine to run it. No thanks.

Picasa on the other hand runs fine on my stone age P3 600 Mhz. I can index and find anything instantly. Also it’s free.

I’ve been thinking about buying one of those Macbooks to run windows in Parallels for Picasa (amongst other things), but now I might just snatch a “regular” Dell or Lenovo laptop with butt loads of Ram, real Video card and run the new Ubuntu with Picasa.

I tried the link for the free Picasa download http://picasa.google.com/linux/ which gives a 404 error. So I agree, if this is just Google saying Picasa now works on WINE (http://winehq.com/) then it’s not called “porting” since it’s not native Linux code. What it would be is Picasa running on WINE which runs on a Linux distribution.

You’re correct that there already are alternative applications such as FSpot and DigiKam which run natively on Linux and just as Picasa are free. What can Picasa do on Linux that applications such as FSpot for example can’t?

I forgot to add that it seems Google missed the boat on this one as people have been asking for a native Linux port of their software solutions such as Picasa for some time. What we get is Picasa now works on WINE which is another good alternative but more to attract the Geek on Linux than a typical computer user. Reason being that unless you’re using commercial WINE such as Codeweavers CrossOver Office which includes a GUI frontend set-up wizard then most people will have difficulty getting free WINE packaged with distributions working with their Windows software. This is because most distributions do not provide detailed instructions on using WINE or even package with their distribution frontend WINE management tools such as http://www.wine-doors.org/trac

Another point is that this isn’t the only project were Google has been lacking. GTalk, Google’s alternative to MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger has yet to be offered for Linux or OSX. Again the project is only ported to Windows even though Google always plays the image as a big supporter of the Linux community and claiming how much they use Linux in their LAN. Though there are projects where developers listen to feedback by consumers. Such as OpenWengo.com which beat developers such as Google by providing a true cross platform messenger solution that runs on Linux, Windows and OSX, allows VOIP/Webcam and can communicate with several third party messengers from GTalk, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, etc.

“What we get is Picasa now works on WINE which is another good alternative but more to attract the Geek on Linux than a typical computer user. Reason being that unless you’re using commercial WINE such as Codeweavers CrossOver Office which includes a GUI frontend set-up wizard then most people will have difficulty getting free WINE packaged with distributions working with their Windows software.”

I know it’s not fashionable, but how about getting a clue before commenting on the great wide internet?

Google hasn’t just made picase work with wine, they are providing native deb and rpm packages of picase running with libwine.

The user doesn’t have to set up anything, he just has to install the native packages just like with any other linux app.

After that picasa will show up in his menu and he can start it like any other linux app, as lo and behold, picasa actually follows the freedesktop guidlines.

If you have been paying attention to the thread you would of noticed multiple readers have experienced issues (404 error) using the link provided by the author. So we were forced to base information as listed in the brief introduction which indicated Picasa is not natively ported to Linux but is instead still requiring WINE be installed to run the Google application. If Google is providing binary packages (packagename.rpm and packagename.deb) for RPM and Debian based Linux distributions which can be easily installed with distribution package managers then that’s great. Though that still doesn’t change the fact the author is misleading readers by using the word “port” when referring to Picasa being ported to Linux as it’s still using WINE to run. As I stated before this is good to have another application capable of running on WINE but to claim it’s a Linux port is false when it requires WINE be installed to work. After all applications such as F-Spot, Gimp, Cinepaint, Maya, XSI, etc don’t require WINE be installed to run as the developers provide a true native Linux port of their software.

“If you have been paying attention to the thread you would of noticed multiple readers have experienced issues (404 error) using the link provided by the author. So we were forced to base information as listed in the brief introduction which indicated Picasa is not natively ported to Linux but is instead still requiring WINE be installed to run the Google application. If Google is providing binary packages (packagename.rpm and packagename.deb) for RPM and Debian based Linux distributions which can be easily installed with distribution package managers then that’s great. Though that still doesn’t change the fact the author is misleading readers by using the word “port” when referring to Picasa being ported to Linux as it’s still using WINE to run. As I stated before this is good to have another application capable of running on WINE but to claim it’s a Linux port is false when it requires WINE be installed to work. After all applications such as F-Spot, Gimp, Cinepaint, Maya, XSI, etc don’t require WINE be installed to run as the developers provide a true native Linux port of their software. ”

You’re still wrong! You don’t have to install ANYTHING except Picassa. There is Wine inside the Picasa RPM (or DEB or plain ol’ .bin), but it’s modified specifically for Picasa. When you run Picasa, it just works. No tweaking, no installing wine, none of that. If you weren’t a big Linux geek you would have no reason to believe that it’s different from any other Linux application.

Furthermore, as people have pointed out, Wine is an API just like Qt or GTK or Xlib. The fact that it originates with the API of MS Windows is immaterial. It’s no different from any of the plethora of proprietary Linux apps that come with their own Qt or Motif libraries bundled (the Xilinx software, for example, comes with its own Qt libraries, but it’s no more or less native Linux than Picasa or Firefox or Konsole).

If you have been paying attention to the thread you would of noticed multiple readers have experienced issues (404 error) using the link provided by the author.

Believe it or not, but I didn’t even need to pay attention to this, as I had run in the same issue earlier.

So we were forced to base information as listed in the brief introduction which indicated Picasa is not natively ported to Linux but is instead still requiring WINE be installed to run the Google application.

No, it doesn’t indicate this at all. All it indicates is that wine is used, not that a seperate wine install is needed.

Though that still doesn’t change the fact the author is misleading readers by using the word “port” when referring to Picasa being ported to Linux as it’s still using WINE to run.

That’s not true either. All libwine is is an api just like gtk and Qt. And as I already said, it really integrates quite nicely, follows freedesktop specs, uses hal, etc.

Perhaps you haven’t read the review (see Update by Thom Holwerda ). Picasa runs as smoothly in linux as in windows and as the review states, it even cleverly shields the user from knowing that it is running on top of wine.

Well it is all 100% compiled as a linux binary, and it isn’t running “on top” of anything. I don’t think you can get any more native than that unless you think a program has to use Gnome/KDE to be considered native. The only difference between this and a qt based program is that this one is using the windows api (but natively) instead of the qt libraries.

As a previous poster has already pointed out, what they did was *port* Picasa to Linux using the libwine compatibility library. This means that you *don’t* have to have Wine installed to run Picasa—as far as the user is concerned, it runs just like any Linux app.

In fact, one can think of libwine as somewhat like Qt. It provides a GUI toolkit, plus APIs to access other OS services.

Yes, this is the key point to understand. Google/Codeweavers has actually set a fine example for windows ISVs everywhere on how to quickly and easily support their win32 applications on Linux. I hate running Lotus Notes on Wine (I have to if I want to simultaneously keep my job and run Linux), and I wish it were ported in this manner.

The Wine layer is essentially a stopgap solution. However, building windows applications for Linux using libwine is a sustainable development practice, offering good performance and usability for both the vendor and end user. I join the posters thanking Google for continuing to contribute positively to free software, albeit at their own pace.

Seriously do you call that a “port”? I mean c’mon, it requires WINE (yuck!), why don’t you guys port it nateibely to linux, using GTK2+ or QT? Using WINE is a bad thing, and IMHO it’s just plain lazy on your behalf. With all the resources that Google has you guys should have natively ported Google Earth and Picasa already. Hell you should open source it so we can build it ourselves, as well as have .RPM .DEBs, or .BIN or even the wonderful .PACKAGE (uses auto package) formats. I’d like to see itt in .TGZ for SlackWare as well. C’mon Google, do us *nix users right, and re-do this monstrosity.

Please could one of the mods alter the description of this story to make it clear that you don’t need Wine installed and that this is a native Linux binary? That should stop a great many people making fools of themselves.

Secondly, why don’t Google want me to have it? I wasn’t aware that the UK was now considered a “rogue state”, and yet Google are doing their best to stop me viewing the site. Poor form.

Oh course, that didn’t stop me actually getting hold of it, and I have to say…. bravo! This is a really good effort by Google and Codeweavers. It’s easy to install, runs very quickly, and is fully functional. A model for others to follow. Now if you could do the same with Google Earth…

Lastly, regarding the requirements being “too recent”… as I understand it, HAL is required to allow Picasa to import pictures from digital cameras. But what’s the point of having this kind of functionality if all the apps have to be hamstrung to still use kernel 2.4?

All right Google! It’s not Google Talk or Earth, but if this goes over well, perhaps it’s a sign of things to come.

Why do you want/need Google Talk? Gaim, and the multitude of other Jabber clients for Linux all work perfectly well with Google Talk, as it uses an open standard. Google even give instructions for configuring Gaim on their website.

The only thing it doesn’t do yet is the voice/video stuff. But they’ve given the lead developer of Gaim a job, and released the specs for their voice and video system, so with any luck it shouldn’t be too long in coming.

People have preferences different than your own. If someone wants to use Google Talk, they can. That’s the great thing; that there are lots of choices. Which is why people love the fact that they can now use Picasa. You use what you like and you shouldn’t demand others to use what you use.

I for one can’t wait till Google Talk is available for Linux. Gaim is not for me as I prefer Google Talk’s interface, which provides simiplicty and voice. Gaim’s redesigned interface just doesn’t cut it for me and of course there’s no voice. I know it will be available, but not till 2.0. I wish Gaim would have gone with a simple interface as Google Talk or Adium…but oh well.

Google Talk seems to be ready as we all know that it will be implemented in Nokia’s Linux tablet. So hopefully it will soon be available for all Linux distributions. And I know Google Talk and Google Earth will not contain WINE, as it will be a native port.

I’ve just installed it on Ubuntu Dapper and it just works fine. Actually “port”, “not port” is not so important. IMHO most important thing is Google’s attention to make Linux “compilant” software whatever Wine, gtk or qt it is. They spent additional money on making Picasa run on Linux. Actually why to do this? We have Windows and etc! But they did, and that’s cool. And not only that, google released all Wine patches.

And Now, when some user comes to download Picasa, he will see Download for Linux and it’s possible, that he thinks – Um, so, this runs on Linux, probably that Linux stuff it’s not so bad after all

I might be able to explain why Google doesn’t allow the code to be downloaded outside the US “easily”. My guess would be that it is due to US government-imposed export restrictions. The US federal government does not want military technology to be exported to what it considers “bad” governments (it decides what constitutes “bad”).

Some software, notably encryption, is considered to be military technology (“dual-use” at least). Shipping this out of the country, and making software available for download is considered “shipping”, could get them into trouble.

There are legal ways around this, but they require getting permits and lawyers involved. That, at a minimum, takes time and resources. Perhaps this will happen at a later time, but Google chose to release the software now to a fairly large audience; they may or may not expand this over time.

I could be wrong about this, but this is the type of issue I’ve seen with other software vendors.

The dependency on wine is a fair criticism. A gtk or qt port would have been much nicer, but having used Picasa on Windows, I can honestly say that it is easier to edit and manipulate photographs with its tools to render more pleasing images than comparable free software applications. It is a very nifty program that someone with even very modest abilities in photo-editing can use to achieve nice results. So, while I share your concern (implied?) about dependency on proprietary software, many users will be quite pleased with this development.